Re: Proposed Browser Bookmark Sharing Standard.

From: Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>

To: xdg-list freedesktop org

Subject: Re: Proposed Browser Bookmark Sharing Standard.

Date: 01 Jul 2003 14:41:05 +1000

On Tue, 2003-07-01 at 13:59, Biju Chacko wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Jun 2003 17:29:29 +0200, David Faure wrote:
>
> > We decided to standardize on XBEL (and Galeon did so too). I think
> > a spec not based on XBEL would be a terrible mistake.
>
> The consensus seems to be the same. This seems to make a great deal of
> sense especially since there is existing support in most of the major
> browsers for XBEL, either as a native format or as an importable format.
This (and some of the previous posts) seems like the wrong way to go
about writing a specification. People are saying "it must be xbel",
without seeing if that meets the requirements of existing browsers.
Designing something that is unsuitable for existing browser XYZ which
has reasonable market share and then proclaiming this design to be
"standard" is a bit uncaring.
Earlier in the thread, Marco posted his thoughts about why Epiphany's
bookmarks do not fit into a version of the XBEL structure. He also
mentioned Safari. Now, I am not particularly enamoured with Epiphany's
bookmarks and I don't use it or Safari, but it would be nice to see if
something could be worked out that at least can be easily transformed
into the scheme for each browser. If XBEL does not provide some feature
that is proven to be truly useful, then more thought is required (this
is obviously different from including every "it would be cool to have
this" feature).
I do not really mean to get too involved in this thread, but people are
really ignoring the requirements gathering phase and just gathering
around the file marked "XBEL" without giving due consideration to
comments from somebody who actually maintains a web browser.
If freedesktop.org contributors want to maintain reputations documenters
of credible specifications that are worth implementing, then more work
needs to go into than this.
Sorry. End of rant. Time for a quiet lie down now.
malcolm